Em managed a gracious smile. ‘Have fun!’ she’d cried to them both as they took their shoes off and plunged in. Of course Izzie and Jack had always had each other as company, she reasoned, and Seren just wanted someone to play with too. Fair enough. No problem! This was all part and parcel of holidaying with kids, she supposed. And if Seren was happy, then so was she.

Her phone started ringing just then, with Izzie’s name on the screen.

‘Hello, love,’ Em said. ‘How’s it going? Are you in Falmouth now?’

‘Yeah. But, um . . .’

Izzie sounded very far away. Was that trepidation in her daughter’s voice? Em hunched over her phone, trying to block out the cacophony around her. ‘What is it? Everything okay?’

‘Mum? Something’s happened.’

‘What?’ Instantly her blood ran cold. Her heart accelerated straight into fifth. Shit. ‘What’s up? Are you all right?’

‘It’s Jack. He . . .’ There was a pause and Em’s imagination rushed helplessly to fill it with all manner of dreadful endings. ‘He’s in a bit of trouble,’ Izzie went on, with a maddening lack of detail. ‘Can you come?’

So there it was: proof, if anyone needed it, that she was a dreadful mother. An optimistic fool who should have known better. She had sent off her children – and someone else’s daughter too! – to Falmouth by themselves, with a few quid and a bottle of water, and assumed they’d have a lovely time and manage perfectly well. Hadn’t she and her cousins all gone off similarly at that age? Her parents had barely turned a hair at the thought of them cycling around the countryside, and that was before there was any such thing as a mobile phone. And yet if she’d bothered to think about it longer than five seconds that morning, she’d have remembered all the scrapes she’d got into herself as a teenager: dodgy blokes leering at her and Jenny in their shorts and bare legs; straying onto farmland and being threatened by shotgun-wielding farmers; and how her cousin Neil’s habit of setting fire to things, aged fourteen, had almost resulted in a hay-barn inferno. Hardly the stuff of ginger beer and innocence, really, when she foraged a little further past her hazy gilded memories.